I admire positive people because as I see it, they epitomise success – we’ve all heard the phrase positivity breeds success, and I believe it does.
The opposite of positivity is negativity – it’s not something I surround myself with, which is why I’m yet to come across anyone I admire who has a negative mindset.
Victor Frankl is someone I admire immensely. He was survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who went on to write one of the most famous books on human psychology called Man’s Search for Meaning.
In his book he famously wrote: “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
I believe this to be true. We choose whether we see the things that happen in our lives as positive or negative. We choose whether we define the glass as being half full or half empty. We choose how we respond to the things that happen to us.
I have found that being positive can be learned. It’s not always easy and for many people something that requires constant work.
In today’s modern world just about everyone has a smart phone and that means a constant bombardment of the 24-hour news cycle, which sadly is mostly negative. In addition to this social media is driven by constant comparisons with others.
I think you’ll agree, now more than ever, it takes a concerted effort to maintain a positive mindset and attitude when there’s so much negative stimulus around us.
Those people who choose a positive mindset can see more opportunities than roadblocks, while people who choose to err on the side of negativity see problems and can’t see clear of them.
Take population growth and migration as one such example. Our population is growing at one of the fastest rates of any developed country. People with a negative mindset will see this is a problem, focussing on the associated challenges, things like congestion, traffic, crowds and housing affordability concerns.
People with a positive mindset will see this as an opportunity, instead choosing to focus on the fact we have five per cent of the world’s land mass, but only 0.3 per cent of the world’s population.
They’ll be focussed on the value of having such diverse cultural influence on our way of living in Australia. Focused on how lucky we are to have so many people wanting to come to our country when the rest of the world is competing for working age migrants to offset ageing populations.
They’ll also welcome the opportunity to build generational wealth when it comes to housing this growing population.
I have found the hardest part of being positive is not dealing with the 24/7 news cycle but dealing with my round-the-clock self-talk.
Reframing a ‘why me’ response to a ‘why not me’ response.
When I was 20, my goal was to become financially independent. I had a $40,000 personal loan and was earning $60,000 per annum at the time.
The self-talk I had to overcome was that ‘99 out of 100 people don’t become financially independent, what makes you think you can be the 1 in 100?’
That’s a negative mindset.
I had to learn to change the way I thought about things. I needed to reframe that way of thinking and instead flip the script to this: ‘There are 270,000 Australians who are financially independent, why can’t I be one of them?’
I know that recalibrating one’s mindset doesn’t change overnight, we simply need to chip away at it over time, and then the work continues in maintaining it.
Someone I admire, who is one of the more positive people I know, once gave me some invaluable advice.
They suggested I reframe my response every time someone asks me how I’m going or how my day was?
Answer that little question with a positive answer. Responding with ‘I had a great day’ or ‘I learned a lot today’. I found that bite-sized thing to be the kick-starter in changing my mindset.
No more bad days, just great days or days where I got to learn and grow. It was a transformative exercise that snowballed into shifting a whole range of other aspects of my mindset.
How’s your day going today? Take the time to think about your response, it matters!
